autobiography
Americannoun
-
autobiographies
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of autobiography
Explanation
You are writing an autobiography when you write your own life story. A writer who writes an autobiography is like a painter who paints a self-portrait. If you intend to write your autobiography one day, it might be a good idea to start recording notes about your life in a diary. The author Gertrude Stein was being clever when she poked fun at the very idea of autobiography when she wrote her own memoirs but titled them The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, instead of The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein.
Vocabulary lists containing autobiography
Words to Live By: Bio
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Write On!: Graph and Gram
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To Thine Own Self Be True: Auto
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
In his first autobiography, Managing My Life, he recounts the experience like this:
From BBC ● Sep. 9, 2026
Lagarde’s own future is likely to be discussed due to the news that her autobiography, to be titled “Lady First,” is set to be published in January.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 9, 2026
Published in London, England, in 1851, the autobiography resurfaced roughly 3,700 miles away in the library of the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 7, 2026
"My mother had regrets about my birth, and I was driven to the edge psychologically," she wrote in her autobiography, "A Personal History of Polka Dots".
From Barron's ● Aug. 27, 2026
Stanton wrote in her autobiography, “but continued to use my ‘mother’s instinct,’ if ‘reason’ is too dignified a term to apply to woman’s thoughts.”
From "Votes for Women!" by Winifred Conkling
The book’s leading actors have been subjects of biographies and autobiographies, and most events have been exhaustively covered in scholarly and popular histories and articles as well as media reports.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 16, 2025
“The projections mirror and amplify that as part of the visual vocabulary, whether that’s Douglass’ newspaper articles or autobiographies, or the text of the Emancipation Proclamation.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 16, 2025
Chapter 9 is about Frederick Douglass and identity-aware liberalism, as expressed through his autobiographies.
From Salon ● Nov. 10, 2024
Eruption, which had original working titles of The Black Zone and Vulcan, is Patterson's first attempt at posthumous publishing - but he is familiar with high-profile collaborations, having written Bill Clinton and Dolly Parton's autobiographies.
From BBC ● Jun. 3, 2024
Pamphlets of verse by negro poets, autobiographies of colored orators.
From "The Underground Railroad: A Novel" by Colson Whitehead
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
